Letters / Where will the clean water needed for hydrogen production coming from?
Alex Armitage is, like many others, extolling the virtues of “green” hydrogen produced using energy generated from wind turbines.
I can’t see how that can be scaled up to provide commercially viable outputs of hydrogen, but of even more fundamental significance is where will they source the clean water required for such conversion through electrolysis?
When I asked the same question of Orkney Islands Council (OIC) the answer I got was that they’d desalinate seawater.
It may be that I misunderstand the processes of energy conversion, but if electricity generated from wind turbines, particularly if they’re located offshore with the transmission loss that will occur before any energy can be used in any conversion process, and that energy is used to desalinate seawater prior to producing hydrogen, how much of the energy will be left for use in any electrolysis process?
Leslie Sinclair
Kirkwall
PS
At present, the public water supply that feeds Kirkwall, the east mainland and linked south isles is stored in a tank at Towerhill, above Kirkwall. It is being regularly replenished by road tanker. This is the result of the public water supply in Orkney being designed by “water engineering experts” in the 1950s who completely forgot about the substantial farm animal population in their calculation of requirements. So much for self-proclaimed ‘experts’!
